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The official site has a nice write-up about Rick leaving the company and moving back into independent films and relocating to Prague (where much of Red Tails was filmed). I'm happy that it seems like he's leaving amicably. I feel that he gets a lot of blame that he doesn't deserve for letting George make the movies he wanted to make, in the reverse of how Gary Kurtz is often deified (when it looks to me like he really didn't have that much influence over the direction of the OT).

McCallum took his role as producer to mean someone who ONLY gets things out of the director's way, and that's what he did, he made it unrealistically easy for Lucas to express ideas. McCallum didn't seem to act as a filter for the wisdom of those ideas, or address challenges and needs for other areas such as actors needing something other than a world of green to interact with. He acted like the parent who gives their child nothing but candy, never teaches them about nutrition and tooth decay, just kept making sure there was more candy before the child could run out.

You've read Making of Star Wars, what if Lucas had gone forward with any of those earlier drafts? What if Lucas had kept in the silly whistling in the hall or lil' Flash Gordon or that sort of stuff? What if someone hadn't been there to focus his efforts into what we got? That's where I think McCallum never held up as a producer, and that's going back to Young Indiana Jones.

McCallum was a f***ing awesome director. He said so himself, and why would he lie about himself?

We've never seen the movies McCallum directed. You don't want to know the sick **** he directed, it'd make the director of Saw puke his guts out and the director of Human Centipede cry in the fetal position rocking back and forth in a corner.

Darth Vader is becoming the Mickey Mouse of Star Wars.

Kylo Ren - came from Space Brooklyn, although he moved to Space Williamsburg before it was trendy.

The use of a lightsaber does not make one a Jedi, it is the ability to not use it.

You've read Making of Star Wars, what if Lucas had gone forward with any of those earlier drafts? What if Lucas had kept in the silly whistling in the hall or lil' Flash Gordon or that sort of stuff? What if someone hadn't been there to focus his efforts into what we got? That's where I think McCallum never held up as a producer, and that's going back to Young Indiana Jones.

I've read it indeed, which is why I'm not sure why Kurtz gets so much love in this regard. I haven't read it since it came out five years ago, but as I recall, everything in the ANH script originated from Lucas aside from the final dialogue, and it seemed like all the changes from draft to draft were Lucas' ideas. Things that were shot and ultimately cut, like you mentioned (or the old lady shaking her fist at the landspeeder), I don't remember whose ideas that was to cut those out, but obviously it was in post-production since that stuff was deleted after it was shot. I don't really remember any mentions of Kurtz going against Lucas on either ANH or ESB - he's turned bitter and vocal about the issues they had on ROTJ, of course, and I wonder how much The Making of ROTJ will go into that.

I've read it indeed, which is why I'm not sure why Kurtz gets so much love in this regard. I haven't read it since it came out five years ago, but as I recall, everything in the ANH script originated from Lucas aside from the final dialogue, and it seemed like all the changes from draft to draft were Lucas' ideas. Things that were shot and ultimately cut, like you mentioned (or the old lady shaking her fist at the landspeeder), I don't remember whose ideas that was to cut those out, but obviously it was in post-production since that stuff was deleted after it was shot. I don't really remember any mentions of Kurtz going against Lucas on either ANH or ESB - he's turned bitter and vocal about the issues they had on ROTJ, of course, and I wonder how much The Making of ROTJ will go into that.

The only person talking about Gary Kurtz here is you.

Darth Vader is becoming the Mickey Mouse of Star Wars.

Kylo Ren - came from Space Brooklyn, although he moved to Space Williamsburg before it was trendy.

The use of a lightsaber does not make one a Jedi, it is the ability to not use it.

Directly, yes - but when people are blaming the producer of the PT for its perceived shortcomings then I think it's apt to compare him to the producer of ANH and ESB and to see how people view both of their roles. I brought him up because I was saying that McCallum shoulders a lot of the blame for not reeling in Lucas during the PT and, conversely, Kurtz gets a lot of credit for reeling him in during ANH and ESB, and I was saying that I believe that neither are completely true. There could have been people at every stage of production that influenced things and led to a different outcome - VFX supervisors could have pushed for different methods instead of CGI, the editors could have paced things differently or removed things that weren't working (see: the improved IMAX version of AOTC), etc. While people weren't calling out Kurtz by name here, if you look at the fandom as a whole, there's a vocal segment that reveres Kurtz for what they believe is his ability to stand up to Lucas and say no - even if that segment wasn't represented in this specific, exact conversation here.

The only big coincidences I can think of for ROTJ and the prequels working not as well as ANH and ESB are producer Gary Kurtz, and George Lucas being married to film editor Marcia Lucas (although I think she was an editor on ROTJ even after the divorce), so some natural correlations will be drawn from that. Do they represent causation? I have seen evidence on both sides of that argument.

That said, we were shown a LOT of Rick McCallum's work during production on the prequels, we've heard directly from him and from George Lucas on what he did, what his role in that area was, so while we can draw question marks out of Gary Kurtz's role in Star Wars, there's far less doubt on what Rick McCallum did.

Darth Vader is becoming the Mickey Mouse of Star Wars.

Kylo Ren - came from Space Brooklyn, although he moved to Space Williamsburg before it was trendy.

The use of a lightsaber does not make one a Jedi, it is the ability to not use it.